ted. It was as if the whole sea of
experience and emotion, suffering and aspiration, was driving, holding,
them together.

So it had been all along.

But not tonight. It was now--or at least so it seemed to Katie--as if
those forces had let them go. What had been as a great sea surging around
their hearts was now just things to talk about.

It left her desolate. And as she grew unhappy, she forced her gaiety and
that seemed to put him the farther away.

The two different worlds had sent Ann away; was it, in a way she was
unable to cope with, likewise to send him away?

Watts passed through the hall. She saw him glance out at the soldier
loweringly and after that he grew more morose, almost sullenly so.

It seemed foolish to talk of one's being free when held by things one
could not even see.

It was just when she was feeling so lonely and miserable she wished he
would go that the telephone rang and central told her that Chicago was
trying to get her.

It was in the manner of the old days that she turned to him and asked
what he thought it could be.

The suggestion--possibility--swept them back to the old basis, the old
relationship. Katie grew excited, unnerved, and he talked to her
soothingly while she waited for central to call again.

They spoke of what it probably was; her brother was in Chicago, Katie
told him, and of course it was he, and something about his own affairs.
Perhaps he had news of when he would be ordered away. Yes, without doubt
that was it.

But there was a consciousness of dissembling. They were drawn together by
the possibility they did not mention, drawn together in the very thing of
not mentioning it.

As in those tense moments they tried to talk of other things, they were
keyed high in the consciousness of not talking of the real thing. And in
that there was suggestion of the other thing of which they were not
talking. It was all inexplicably related: the excitement, the tenseness,
the waiting, the dissembling.

Katie had never been more lovely than as she sat there with her hand
on the telephone: flushed, stirred, expectant--something stealing back
to her eyes, something both pleading and triumphant in Katie's eyes
just then.

The man sitting close beside her at the telephone desk scarcely took his
eyes from her face.

When the bell rang again and her hand shook as it took down the receiver
he lay a steadying hand upon her arm.

At first there was nothing more than a cont